Distributed, fault-tolerant communication systems are used, for example, in applications where a failure could possibly result in injury or death to one or more persons. Such applications are referred to here as “safety-critical applications.” One example of a safety-critical application is in a system that is used to monitor and manage sensors and actuators included in an airplane or other aerospace vehicle
Often safety critical applications are implemented using a time-triggered, table driven communications architecture, for example, SAFEbus, FlexRay or Time-Triggered Protocol (TTP). To provide tolerance to physical faults, robust communications topologies that allow for point-to-point fault isolation (such as star, mesh, ring, and braided ring configurations) are often deployed. However, such topologies may introduce undesirable overhead for in the form of additional components (for example, in star configurations) or extra wiring complexity (for example, in mesh or braided ring configurations).